View from the Bridge: 16

by John Morrison

Willow Woman operates a two-pronged strategy to avoid being burgled. She
leaves her front door open, so burglars will think: "Nobody sane leaves
their door open unless they're at home". Plan B - just in case this
strategy fails - is to ensure her house looks so chaotic that any intruder
who gains entry will assume she's already been burgled and leave
empty-handed.

Willow Woman's life is so painfully convoluted that Ken Russell considered
making a film of it. Her response to everyday calamities is to bake. Using
the smoke detector as a food timer, she turns out mountainous batches of
inedible stoneground bread. It's called 'stoneground', incidentally,
because its main constituent is gravel. Her loaves look like dead
armadillos. Sky uses them for building barricades.

Despite the succession of men in her life, Willow Woman actually finds a
relationship with two people in it rather overcrowded. You yearn to hear,
just once, those magic words: "Well, that's enough about me; what the hell
is happening to you".

Willow Woman is gorgeous - there's no doubt about it - and blessed with an
award-winning bone structure. Town Drunk is one of her most appreciative
admirers; he has built up a small but select collection of underwear
purloined from her washing line in Hippy Street.

In a way that would astonish the residents of, say, Cheltenham or Bath, the
back-streets of Milltown are bedecked with washing lines. There are still
women here whose perceived role as wife and mother demands that the
family's clothes aren't merely clean, but seen to be clean. In the same way
that shooting parties of the past would pose for a photograph with an
obscenely huge pile of gamebirds, the women of Milltown like to put the
fruits of their industry on public display. So it's a familiar noise, the
crackle of sheets thrashing about in a drying wind.

In fact, the work ethic has been a cornerstone of Milltown life for
generations, which is why the sight of work-shy young folk sitting around
in the town square, downing alcopops and mulling over the big questions
(like: have Waggon Wheels got smaller, or is it just that we've got
bigger?) is anathema to the older generation. Yet the idlers make a
colourful sight - like tropical birds drugged for transit to some far-off
aviary.

* * *

It comes as a surprise to those untutored in the folklore of the 'old
straight tracks' to discover that Milltown lies on the convergence of some
very powerful ley-lines. It even surprises Willow Woman (usually happy to
espouse any old mumbo-jumbo) when Wounded Man produces a scruffy map of
Milltown, seemingly drawn by an artistically challenged five-year-old and
criss-crossed with lines.

As a founder member of the Society for the Investigation of Unlikely
Phenomena (Milltown Chapter), he has wasted many an evening searching for
significances where none exist. "This line", he points out, stabbing the
map at random with a grubby finger, "is in perfect alignment with three
important features: the church spire, a hollow tree and the public bar of
the Grievous Bodily Arms". He leans back, feeling his point is proved
beyond reasonable doubt, unaware that the back of Willow Woman's sofa is
caked in fresh cat vomit.

But what are these lines? Ancient tracks? Landing strips for
extra-terrestrial craft? Or merely the vapid outpourings of over-active
imaginations? Having researched the history of road protesting, Sky favours
the first option. She has unearthed exciting evidence that one of her
distant ancestors tried - unsuccessfully - to thwart a controversial
ley-line widening scheme.